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From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 25, Dated 23 June 2012 |
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| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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ANURAG KASHYAP |
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‘Float a camera and you find crazy things’
Exhilarated but exhausted by the reception of Gangs of Wasseypur at Cannes, Anurag Kashyap wants to sleep for five months. Before going into hibernation, he talks about shaping the landscape and the scope of the film, and its embedded “investigative journalism”
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Anurag Kashyap
Photo: Appurva Shah |
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ON SELECTING A SCRIPT
Watching a lot of Marathi and Tamil films like Paruthiveeran, Subramaniapuram and Angadi Theru, I started getting this feeling that I had been looking in the wrong direction. When you watch too much European cinema, everything becomes city-centric and I realised I wasn’t looking at where I came from. When Zeeshan (writer Syed Zeeshan Qadri) came to me with the script, Gangs of Wasseypur (GoW) was a contemporary story about a gang war today, a replica of City of God. People think that if you remake an Oscar-winning film you might replicate its success and win an Oscar. These are inexperienced writers, but they are passionate and sincere people. So I read the script and told them, “Boss, this is City of God. I’m not an idiot.” They were offended. To prove a point, they pulled out these underlined newspaper clippings — all the scenes were drawn from them. From a long article about coal mining, these guys had underlined two sentences, which formed the backbone of their film, a parallel to a film that had already been made. But the rest of the article was much more interesting to me — it told a different story. The violence in the real story of Wasseypur sounded pointless. Though I had decided a long time ago not to do any more gangster films — I was part of Satya, I had worked with Ramu (Ram Gopal Varma), I had done Black Friday — it was the pointlessness of that violence that made me wonder who these people were. Until then, I didn’t know a place like that existed, it didn’t even exist on Google. Yet for the people who lived there, it was the whole world, they’d been fighting for that world for six-and-a-half decades. Around the village was a whole city that had expanded, become Dhanbad, but these people had been stuck in that feud for ever. All they wanted to do was be the king of Wasseypur.
ON SETTING FUNDS & FINDING SETS
Gangs of Wasseypur was potentially an impossible film to make. Imagine making a film that spans six-and-a-half decades with three different time zones and generations, creating an emotional and physical landscape that was different for each (for instance, Dhanbad in the 1940s, ’60s and ’70s). My father was an engineer. He had always been transferred to such pockets of industry. So I had seen that life and knew how it progressed. A film like this could have cost Rs 70-80 crore. I knew that was not feasible. But having spent my childhood in North India, I knew the belt where I was setting up my story. I knew, for instance, where to find the village that still would not have electricity, where to find the ghost town of my youth, which had lain unchanged since the late ’70s. The moment I started thinking, I realised I could pull this off. The house in the film where Manoj Bajpai’s character lives is the one where Abhinav (Kashyap) was born and I was raised. While the actual Wasseypur is just two streets, when I heard the script what I really saw was the possibility of creating a landscape. The story gave me an opportunity to explore an entire region of North India that I had seen, the landscape that had not been explored in films before.
The Wasseypur in my film is quite exaggerated. The emotional graph of its characters is also heightened. It’s based on real things, but the characters have been fictionalised. This larger story that I had to tell needed a vaster physical and emotional landscape. I needed to shoot the mines in their surreal and exaggerated glory.
ON BREAKING NEWS AND MAKING MOVIES
I have this investigative journalistic instinct too! I wanted to see the ground reality of coal mining. So we used actual footage of sand being mined. My shots of coal being stolen are real. I get a vicarious journalistic thrill by including actual footage in my films like Black Friday and Dev D where the scene with the cop taking a bribe is real! If you just float a camera around, you find crazy things happening. I like including that. Then you realise, if I can take an actual shot of people stealing coal from a mine that’s bigger than the Gateway of India, how can the authorities not see this? An entire river, which is clearly the only source of water in the region, is being mined dry — it’s impossible that such a thing hasn’t been noticed. There were times when we were threatened, my cameraman was beaten up, my Second Assistant Director (AD) Shlok Sharma was slapped and taken to jail thrice. But they took the shot, offered an excuse and claimed that they were doing some random research. Although we did eventually get permission to shoot around the mines, guerrilla shooting is necessary to keep things authentic. I didn’t just want a pile of sand on my set, I wanted that wide shot that shows the cavernous mines.
ON LOSS AND SEPARATION
We have a close-knit, fun-loving team. If I get a good shot, I start dancing. I have never screamed at anyone. The biggest setback for this film was when our First AD died in a freak accident. He was someone we all depended on. When we lost him, we couldn’t shoot for seven or eight days. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Everyone was constantly missing him. It took a whole month for everyone to resume business. Finally, we made the film without a First AD because we believed he was irreplaceable.
We always knew that we would have to split up the film, so we worked with that in mind throughout (GoW will release in two parts of approximately two-and-a-half hours). The heartburn was over which portions to keep in the first half and which to shift to the second. The first cut for GoW was seven hours long. So to take out the 1 hour 50 minutes was painful. At 18 crore, GoW is the most expensive non-star cast film ever made. If this film makes the kind of money we are expecting, it will give us the freedom to be honest. It will allow me to do what I want to do. It will earn trust and an audience for me. We are also hoping to crack the international non-diaspora market. And while reviews do matter, what is more important for me at this point are the sales. We have managed to sell the film to distributors, which ensures we don’t have to rely on the market economics of the Indian film industry alone. For instance, it is slated for a 26 July mainstream release in France, UAE, Brazil and Argentina. We are negotiating for more countries and the kind of overseas prices being offered to us are 10 times of what they once were. So we are becoming less dependent on the structure of the Indian market and the fluctuations of its taste.
ON CO-OPTING & CORRUPTING THE CREATIVES
I use the music in the film to bind all these anthropological and historical threads together. These 25 songs are almost like a background score. I didn’t expect the music of the film to do so well. We thought it was too rooted and people would not appreciate it but the success of the music suggests that maybe we have been listening to one kind of music for too long.
For my films, I need people who can devote a lot of time, because my creative process works through a process of negation — realising what not to do as opposed to a list of things I must do. I pick people who understand where I’m coming from, who are willing to go the distance. I also largely try to pick newcomers because they are hungry. I picked Amit Trivedi for the music even before we wrote the script. We already had eight tracks by the time we sat down to write the script. Sneha Khanwalkar has worked for three-and-a-half years in the industry. She had worked with Dibakar (Banerjee) before. After Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, I kept her occupied; I didn’t leave her for Dibakar! There were other considerations. I only wanted North Indians, people who understood the milieu. I wanted people who were available for me all the time through the shooting. I have a theatre background so while I write a bare structure, I let the story evolve as I shoot. There is a lot of improvisation, and I need them to be around to pick up on how the characters are changing shape.
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Chasing reality A scene from Gangs of Wasseypur |
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It’s difficult because what people don’t realise is that actors have the most boring job on the planet. When they’re not shooting, they’re bored to death. Since Gulaal, I carry a huge collection of eclectic cinema from all over the world. I make a screening room on my sets, so that anyone who is not working at the moment can be taken there and corrupted by world cinema! So people who had grown up on Hindi cinema were watching five to six movies in a row all of a sudden in languages they had never heard earlier, in formats they had never imagined. By the end of it, I think they’d all been corrupted. I’ve seen them all change as artists because of it and nothing makes me happier. Last year, I went for the Mumbai Film Festival and suddenly discovered that all my actors were there; not one had told me that they’d be going! It also shows in the kind of scripts they reject afterwards. I try to corrupt them for my selfish reasons because I think people need to have a wider palette before they accept or reject shades of creative expression. Bollywood has a tendency to reject these without the faintest inkling of what they are.
ON BEING THE BIGGEST BACHCHAN
We’ve seen enough mafia films about people killing each other and family feuds. But we never seem to explore what it is that the mafia actually does. The mafia has changed over the years; it does not steal coal anymore. The people who control coal are the government and ministry officials. They’re the ones doing the stealing. In a sense, my story is about the shifting modes of power. In the process of making this film I realised the mafia is nothing but non-Nationalistic naxals. Just like the naxals believe we live off and with our natural resources, the coal mafia feels that they are being deprived of these resources, they feel resentment about the fact that outsiders come in and take all their earned benefits away and leave them with chicken feed.
Around the late ’60s, early ’70s, the Congress party was full of people who were hero-worshipped by the masses. All of this changed after the Emergency. Films started being censored, people started to be controlled, corruption began to set in. This was also when Amitabh Bachchan dawned on cinema. For generations we had believed in a dream and we suddenly realised that the benefits of that dream were not meant for us, for the common man. It was meant for a chosen few. The wronged man as the anti-hero got justice for the local people. There’s a sequence in GoW that tells this story — Nawazuddin, who is an Amitabh Bachchan fan and a sort of Bachchan-esque figure to his village, is sitting on a train in front of a guy who is more Amitabh Bachchan than him. They’re silently staring at each other trying to assess, who is a bigger Bachchan? You or me? We are all fanatics for the anti-hero. After Bachchan it was Sanjay Dutt, after Sanjay it was Salman Khan — the labour class heroes are not SRK and Ranbir Kapoor. Their heroes are the bad boys who take on the system, live with swagger.
As told to Nishita Jha
Nishita Jha is a Senior Correspondent with Tehelka.
nishita@tehelka.com
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GoW SONGS
Synesthesia
In the middle of all the dhishum-dhishum, a heavyweight musical score tunes thoughts to lots of sex, says Aditi Saxton
Think of something so familiar that when you pay attention to it, it feels strange. Sneha Khanwalkar’s compositions for GoW are authentic, original, seminal even, especially true to the root of that word, and yet on a first hearing they are intimately known. And on a closer listen, they emulsify into an already adored lilt shaken with a saucy, succulent tilt.
The promo plays the obvious jingle, I Am A Hunter, with its single jejune pun on gun. But the tap-swoosh of Vedesh Sookoo’s reggae fun would have been limp without the hard knock beginning, a yokel yodel of “high-low, hey-lo, hai-law”. Lionel Richie just lost his subcontinental stranglehold on how to say hello. Mixed with mostly English lyrics, the Bihari bits, “Daily goli nikle, automatic, tun, tun” shouted or twanged rather than sung, have meaty beats, and yes, the penis jokes keep suggesting themselves. In a graveyard of Bollywood mashups where the spectre of imagination is scared to loom, this short import from Trinidad & Tobago mated with a plainspeaking Patna lives and thrives.
With all its frequent, obvious, drilled-in allusions to sex, the songs of Wasseypur are the antithesis of porn. Porn as a failure of the imagination, with its agglomerated anatomical moving parts in repetitive, mechanical detail is somewhat like pop. It’s at the distant end of the dial from soft, hot, subtle suggestions of sex, the deeper desires which these melodies stir. Khanwalkar and Amit Trivedi’s Keh Ke Loonga duet has her hoarse, soaring voice, slamming into his planted, playful one, both dripping with the stunningly penned words by Piyush Mishra: Ras bheege saude ka ye, khooni anjam— the bloody spoils of juicy trades — keh ke loonga. When Khanwalkar’s sustained screech melds into the high notes of a shehnai, it dispels that firmly lodged songworm, the “pe-pe-pe-pain” of the shehnai in Chance Pe Dance. There is scarcely a musical risk that Khanwalkar won’t take. Raw is the most readily ascribed attribute to her harmonies, but she has sandpapered these songs to get exactly the grain she wants. And her style of unfinished has more élan than any shabby chic aesthetic masquerading as pretty.
O Womaniya gets into the nooks of the Bhojpuri panghat, where the womenfolk stay. The “haveli ki hava” was recently done well with Genda Phool, but this has a more brazen, feminist feel with what begins to be a requisite amount of raunch. The ooos of the back-up chorus are a rustic rendering of any number of the golden era of Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar and it’s one in Sneha’s plethora of merged ‘a-ha’ and ‘ha-ha’ moments. In massaging material everyone knows — Ik Bagal, Mishra’s poetic anthem has half an air of Jaag dard-e-ishq, jaag Hemant Kumar — the melodies manage to be both a tribute and a subversion. Or perhaps, perversion? What they are is decidedly different and possibly best listened to in the privacy of your own head.
Aditi Saxton is Features Editor, Tehelka.
aditi@tehelka.com
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